Meet Yesware Engineer Justin Mills

Justin Mills is fascinated by architecture and design. The newest addition to the Yesware team, he understands the fundamental importance with which operations, tooling, client and server layers must work together to achieve a superior product and customer experience. We’re excited to welcome Justin on board and implement his expertise to make Yesware even better.

Where are you from and what have you done before Yesware?

I’m originally from Oklahoma and California. I moved to Boston for graduate school at MIT and never looked back.

My first job out of school was at Ab Initio, where I worked on various components of their computing platform, as well as a business rules application. I also got a chance to get out into the field and see what it was like to not only write software but install it, train clients and build solutions to real problems. I moved on to a position at Brightcove, working on many aspects of their video platform, including video ingest, reporting and an admin portal application. Prior to Yesware, I worked for Bluefin Labs, building a first-of-its-kind social media analytics platform, where I was the second engineer.

How did you grow into a Software Engineering role?

I did my undergraduate degree at Oklahoma State University studying architecture and engineering. While there I convinced my professors to let me use programs I had written on my calculator in my exams. They figured if I learned the subject enough to write code to solve it, I probably understood it enough. I went to graduate school at MIT where I formally studied programming and started working professionally as a software engineer from there.

Why did you think that Yesware would be a good fit for you?

The people. After hearing the way everyone I met described working at Yesware and their work style, I knew this would be a great group of folks to work with. Talking with Matthew Bellows it seemed clear that this was a culture cultivated intentionally and there was a leader who I could get behind. The stage Yesware is at right now is also very exciting. It’s a small company, still in the early stages with big engineering challenges ahead. And they have a working product with live customers! That makes things all the more challenging and re-assuring that they’re on to something.

What are you most excited to accomplish in your first 100 days at Yesware?

I’m really looking forward to learning technologies that are new to me and the Yesware product and starting to apply that in meaningful way that will benefit the Yesware team. I’m hopeful the first 100 days will see me through my “firsts”. Some are fun (first code deployed to production) and some will be painful (first bug in production) and some will be rewarding (first customer success).